Various terminal devices including personal computers (PCs), mobile phones, smartphones, and tablet devices are currently capable of accessing contents provided via the Internet. However, each of the contents is not necessarily capable of being played back in the same manner on all the terminal devices. In addition, the contents may be played back in different manners even in the same terminal device depending on the kinds of Web browsers that are used, plug-ins that are installed, or the like. This is because contents exist, which include an incompatible portion depending on specific terminal devices or specific Web browsers.
In the above incompatible situation, playback of contents has been hitherto devised, for example, in the following methods.
In a first method, a content providing side acquires information about a terminal device of a requester for a content and provides the content in a format appropriate for the terminal device. For example, the content providing side prepares contents matched with decoders or resolutions of respective terminal devices. Alternatively, the content providing side generates contents corresponding to respective terminal devices, for example, HyperText Markup Language (HTML) contents for PCs, HTML contents for mobile phones, and the like.
In a second method, a content providing side sets, in the content, parameters to cause a terminal device to perform a behavior appropriate for the content. The terminal device, for example, displays or plays back the content in accordance with the parameters. For example, on a Web site of a bank, a keyword “Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=15768000” is included in the content to vary the behavior of a Web browser in order to play back the content in Secure Socket Layer (SSL) communication. In a content described in HTML5, playback with a Chrome engine is instructed with a keyword “meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” content=“chrome=1”.
Japanese Patent No. 4712722 and International Publication Pamphlet No. WO 2009/084591 disclose related technologies.
However, contents are prepared for multiple kinds of terminal devices in the first method. Accordingly, it is difficult to adopt the first method if the content providing side does not have a size sufficient for the preparation of the multiple kinds of contents. In addition, some contents include a code that normally operates only on specific operating systems (OSs) or specific Web browsers and any conversion method for the code is not established. It is difficult for such a content to be played back in the same manner on various terminal devices.
In order to allow a user of the terminal device to comfortably browse a content by the second method, there is a problem in that the user makes the time and effort to select a Web browser or an OS in accordance with the content.